Joan of Arc

She heard voices in her father's garden when she was thirteen. She went to the Dauphin of France when she was seventeen. She relieved the siege of Orléans in nine days. She organized the coronation of Charles VII at Reims. She was captured at Compiègne and sold to the English for ten thousand livres. She was tried for heresy by the Bishop of Beauvais. She was burned in the marketplace of Rouen on May 30, 1431. She was nineteen years old.

She was canonized as a saint four hundred and eighty-nine years later. The fire could not have the last word.

In the spring of 1429, France was losing the Hundred Years War. The English and their Burgundian allies controlled Paris and the north. The siege of Orléans threatened to open the Loire valley to complete English domination. The Dauphin Charles had been declared illegitimate by his own mother and was governing a remnant kingdom from the Loire valley. Then a peasant girl from the borderland village of Domrémy arrived at Chinon and said that God had sent her to save France.

I. Ioakim's Joan of Arc is full-length literary historical fiction - twenty-eight chapters that enter the mind of the Maid from the voices in Domrémy to the fire in Rouen, from the eleven-day ride to Chinon to the nine days at Orléans, from the coronation at Reims to the trial record that is the most complete record of her voice that history has preserved.

She was nineteen years old. She had been in the field for thirteen months. The voices were real to her. The fire was real. The name endures.